One woman, many voices

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Monthly Archives: January 2011

I don’t have the time right now to translate this post into Jamaican. Sorry to disappoint those of you who look forward to reading Jamaican. But I’ll do it for next week when I’ll be under a little less pressure.

Frederic Cassidy and Morris Cargill were white Jamaicans whose responses to the culture of the black majority reveal radically different mindsets. Morris Cargill suffered from a terrible superiority complex. He was an opinionated newspaper columnist and lawyer who had absolutely no respect for local intellectual traditions.

Frederic Cassidy was a gentleman-scholar who contributed in great measure to the academic life of the Caribbean and far beyond. As a professor of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1960s, Cassidy led the research project that resulted in the publication of the multi-volume Dictionary of American Regional English.

Perverse Pleasure

Morris Cargill

For more than forty years, Morris Cargill used his column in the colonialist Gleaner to batter black people. He couldn’t have gotten away with it in the U.S., Britain or any mature democracy. But this is Jamaica. Racism is cute. Cargill took perverse pleasure in preaching the gospel of the natural inferiority of African people to Europeans.

Cargill, ever provoking, once wrote a newspaper column headlined, “Corruption of Language is no Cultural Heritage.” He seemed to be claiming that African peoples and our languages are sub-human. And the Caribbean Creoles that developed out of the many African languages brought over in the heads of our ancestors are nothing but monkey talk.

I was so vexed when I read that column, I had to reply: “Cho, Misa Cargill, Rispek Juu!’” I decided to answer Cargill in Jamaican, the very language he was dissing. And I used the writing system for the language that had been developed by Professor Cassidy. A horse of a different colour.

A Labour of Love

Frederic Cassidy celebrated the verbal creativity of the black people among whom he grew up. His book, Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica, which was jointly published in 1961 by the Institute of Jamaica and Macmillan in London, is a labour of love.

It is true that the subtitle of the book plays down the African elements in our language. By the way, I prefer the nationalist label ‘Jamaican,’ rather than the academic ‘Creole’ or the much more popular ‘patwa.’ But whatever name you call it, the language clearly has African features, which Cassidy does acknowledge.

In collaboration with the equally distinguished linguist, Robert LePage, Cassidy produced The Dictionary of Jamaican English. Published in 1967, the dictionary is still not widely known here. The prohibitive cost was a factor.

Thankfully, as a result of my initiative, Cambridge University Press sold the paperback rights to the University of the West Indies Press. The cost of the dictionary has been greatly reduced. Every single Jamaican school can now afford to put The Dictionary of Jamaican English in its library.

Fulling the Space

The day after my response to Cargill’s wicked column was published, I got a whole heap of complaints from plenty people who hadn’t bothered to read the pronunciation guide to the Cassidy writing system that I’d included. So they were frustrated. As Cargill himself put it in his off-the-cuff reply, they ‘couldn’t make head or tale of the maze of phonetics.’

But what upset them even more was the fact that their children could read the text so easily. That’s not hard to understand. The Cassidy writing system is phonetic and all the children did was to apply commonsense to the strange-looking text. As Mr. Anthony Sewell, the postman in the neighbourhood where I used to live, put it so brilliantly, ‘it full the space of our real African language.’

Unmasking Ignorance

One of fascinating features of the Dictionary of Jamaican English is its account of the origin of the words it defines. Or, as Professor Cassidy himself says, “A word is an encyclopaedia. It tells you about the people who use it, where they come from and what their lives are like.”

Many of our Jamaican words come straight from West Africa. Asham. The original word in Twi, one of the languages of Ghana, is ‘o-siam.’ Look it up in the Dictionary if you don’t know the meaning! Then you might think that the word ‘mirazmi’ is African. You’ll discover that it’s actually Latin, ‘marasmus.’ And, would you believe it, the word ‘cashew’ entered the English language via Jamaica.

Professor Hubert Devonish (right), Sir Colvile Young, governor general of Belize (left) and Dr. Marta Dijkhoff, former minister of education in the Netherland Antilles. From the Gleaner website, Ian Allen/Photographer

The historic conference on “Language Policy in the Creole-Speaking Caribbean” that was convened last week by Professor Hubert Devonish, Head of the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, was a huge success.

The conference brought together, from across the region, ministers of government (present and past), representatives of various educational and cultural institutions, civil society activists and linguists, of course, on a mission to spread the word on the power of our local languages.

On the eve of the historic University of the West Indies conference on “Language Policy in the Creole-Speaking Caribbean,” I have to tell the story of the upsetting experience I had last year in a Resident Magistrate’s court in Jamaica. I was there representing myself as the defendant in a case against an unscrupulous supplier of windows who had sued me for refusing to pay for defective windows.

Believe it or not, he had conceded that the windows were substandard. But he intended to refund my deposit only if I agreed that he could remove the faulty windows within a month or so. If I did not let him remove the windows within that narrow time frame, I would be forced to purchase them!

Since he had taken almost 5 months to install windows that should have been ready in about 3 weeks, I considered his proposal completely wicked and refused to be pressured into buying sub-standard windows. I made it quite clear that I needed time to decide on alternative windows and then to have them manufactured. Refusing to bow to reason, the unconscionable man proceeded to sue me.

I won the case but wasted a lot of time in court. All the same, I learnt a lot about deaf, dumb and blind ‘justice’ in the Jamaican courts. One morning, as I waited for my case to be heard, I listened in amazement as the judge explained in quite sophisticated English how she was proposing to handle a dispute about unpaid rent.

The defendant was told that the case was going to be sent to a mediator who would discuss exactly how much rent the defendant would have to pay. The distressed defendant kept on insisting in Jamaican that she didn’t owe as much rent as the landlord claimed. The judge continued speaking in English, simply repeating her proposal. This back-and-forth went on for a good few minutes.

At the risk of being deemed in contempt of court, I jumped up and asked the judge if she would allow me to translate her comments for the defendant. She agreed. As soon as the woman understood the proposal, she accepted it. What angered me was the smug question the judge then asked: “Is that what I should have said?” To which I disdainfully replied, “Yes, Your Honour.”

Surely, the judge should know that justice cannot be dispensed in a language that the defendant does not understand! What bothered me is that the judge must have realised that the defendant did not understand her. But it did not occur to her that she needed to use “that” language, Jamaican.

That same day, the stubborn judge refused to acknowledge the fact that another defendant had not understood her ruling. In this case, the plaintiff did not appear in court and so the case was dismissed. But the poor defendant, who did not understand that he was free to go, sat in the court for another hour waiting for the case to be tried.

I was so vexed, I again jumped up and asked the judge why she would not make it clear to the man that he was free to go. I couldn’t believe it when she said that she had told the man he could go and if he wants to sit there it’s his business! It clearly didn’t matter to her that the man did not understand. That was his problem, not hers. I took it upon myself to tell the man that he’d gotten off. And he quickly left the court.

Now this is a judge who considered it appropriate to dress me down because, in her opinion, I was not properly dressed for court. On yet another court appearance, I considered myself dressed to kill in a kris white linen pants suit. I couldn’t believe it when the judge declared that my pants were mid-calf, and this was not acceptable.

I excused myself and went into the corridor. I unbuttoned my pants, got them to drop a good few inches and then hobbled back into court like those young men with their pants waist at their knees. Of course, I had to hobble very carefully because if the pants fell to the floor I would definitely be in contempt of court.

The judge insisted that the extra inches made absolutely no difference. She pointed to one of the men and informed me that his pants length was the standard: the hem of my pants had to go right down to the floor. In complete frustration, I turned to leave the court when a police officer said to me, “Just tell her seh yu sorry!” I did, with much insincerity.

The Half-Way-Tree courthouse from the website of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust

I couldn’t believe it! A few inches of cloth was a bigger issue than making sure that the language of the courts is understood by all citizens. Hopefully, the long-overdue conference on “Language Policy in the Creole-Speaking Caribbean” will eventually result in a law that will protect the language rights of all citizens. The business of the courts, for example, must be conducted in Jamaican for clients who do not know English. This is natural justice, plain and simple.

The Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica is convening an international conference on Language Rights and Policy in the Creole-speaking Caribbean on January 13 and 14. Here’s the link to the conference website: www.caribbeanlanguagepolicy.com/conference-information.html

For far too long, the Creole mother tongues of the vast majority of Caribbean peoples have been dismissed and devalued by the formal educational institutions in many countries across the region. An outstanding exception is Haiti where Kreyol is recognised as an official language.

In Jamaica, for example, we desperately maintain the fiction that English is the mother tongue of most citizens. It is not. English is a second language that is inefficiently taught in schools and inadequately learnt by many students.

In a newspaper article, “Whose class are you in?”, published in the Jamaica Gleaner on October 24, 2010, I raise the disturbing question of how children in primary schools are ever going to learn anything at all if teachers try to communicate exclusively in English, a language that most students do not understand. Here’s the link to that article:

jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20101024/cleisure/cleisure4.html

Even at university level in Jamaica, many students need to take remedial classes in English. Our school system has simply failed students all the way up; and just passed them on. If we were to take the Creole mother tongue seriously as a language of instruction in schools we would do a much better job of teaching English. At the very least, students would learn how to distinguish between the two languages.

The Jamaican Language Unit’s historic conference will address the pressing issue of a Charter on Language Rights and Language Policy for the Caribbean region. As noted in the press release for the conference, the draft charter that will be on the agenda of the two-day meeting was designed by a group of “30 international experts on Caribbean languages and their roles in education, the law and culture.”

The target audience for this far-reaching conference comprises Ministers of Education, Justice and Culture. The question of language rights is serious business even though many elites across the region think that Creole languages are a big joke. Language rights are, ultimately, a matter of social justice.